War on the Horizon
by sarsaparillia
Summary: These are the things nightmares are made of. — Joffrey/Sansa/Jon, Arya.
1. begin the decay

**disclaimer**: disclaimed.  
**dedication**: happy Christmas, Chloe. may you continue to drive me up the wall until both our bones turn to dust.  
**notes**: this belongs to the same universe as _spare me your judgements_, so I suggest you go read that first as this will make NO SENSE without that background.

**title**: begin the decay  
**summary**: These are the things nightmares are made of. — Joffrey/Sansa/Jon, Arya.

—

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Jon Snow held onto the woman who had been his mother for the last time.

"Take care of the girls, Jon," she whispered. "They'll need you."

"Yes, Lady Stark," he said.

"Mother," Catelyn said sternly as she pulled away. She patted his cheeks, just as she had when he was young, and still shorter than she. All her children were growing up—Robb and Jon, and Theon, too. Her boys.

"Mother," Jon repeated, throat tight.

"There's my boy," she said. She stood tall, shoulders loose but spine hard as diamond. Her eyes were dry, chin held high. Jon thought _The Queen has nothing on this woman. Nothing_.

They would ride for the South on the King's Road at daybreak. They would leave his brothers and his home and the only mother he'd ever known.

Jon swallowed hard.

This was how it had to be.

—

The King's Road was dangerous, everyone said, and that was true—there were bandits in these parts, the wild men, killers all.

But the most dangerous person on this road, Jon knew, was the heir apparent. Joffrey hungered for the world, cruelty in his every movement. Arya watched him with angry grey eyes, and stayed close to Jon's side. There were other boys her age with the King's troupe, but she avoided them with her gaze hard. Jon's youngest sister had not wanted to leave Winterfell, still enamoured with her childhood, and was not prepared for the heat and the stinging gazes of the court in the South. King's Landing was Arya's worst nightmare, Jon had no doubt.

Sansa was a different story entirely.

She rode with the Queen, most often, starry-eyed over the woman's grace and beauty. Cersei Lannister humoured the girl, smiling with her mouth but not her eyes, but Jon could tell that the green-eyed Queen paid little attention to Sansa. Her mind was elsewhere, a cold calculating creature who would eat the world if she could.

The Queen watched the world, and Joffrey watched Sansa.

He watched her like a starving hungry thing, his eyes flickering up and down her, mouth twitching like he wanted to unhinge his jaw and swallow her whole. The Queen may have wanted to eat the world, but damn the world; Jon did not love the world.

Joffrey wanted to eat Sansa, and Jon did love Sansa.

"I don't like it," Jon told his father, one night when the moon was dark and the troupe had settled to camp for the night. It had not been a good day. Outside, the torches flickered, and the guards stood watch because even though there had not been an attack yet there was nothing to say there _wouldn't_ be. Robert Baratheon slept in this camp, and the King was always a target.

In the flickering candlelight of House Stark's makeshift home, Jon's father looked at him with tired old eyes. There were deep dark creases there that he could not remember.

"We shouldn't have left," Jon said.

Ned heaved a quiet sigh from somewhere deep in his chest. His hand was heavy on Jon's shoulder, callused from long use of a sword. "We didn't have a choice."

"Joffrey is going to kill Sansa," Jon said quietly. "If they marry, she's going to die."

His father did not deny this; he merely frowned, the lines around his mouth and eyes deepening. "Keep watch, Jon. King's Landing is an unpleasant place, and the girls will need you."

"Mother said that, too," Jon said.

"It's true," Ned said, tiredly. "They _will_ need you."

But he could tell that his father really only meant Sansa—Arya had Needle and Nymeria and her _dance_ lessons, and she was already a terror in miniature. Sansa was the one who needed protection, because Sansa—sweet, naïve, lovely Sansa who did not believe in the cruelty of men and kept her direwolf calm with gentle hands and soft touches—was the one liable to get hurt. Arya was tough as the stone walls they'd grown up in; Arya was a Northern girl, inside and out.

Sansa was forgiving, and Sansa was tender, and sometimes Jon thought that perhaps she was the last good thing in the entire world.

And he could not allow Joffrey Baratheon to destroy that.

"Don't worry, father," Jon said grimly. "I will."

—

King's Landing was a putrid city.

There was no other word Jon knew to apply to the place that would describe it so aptly; it was a cesspool of liars and thieves, stinking sewers and the rank smell of too many unwashed people packed into too small an area.

Winterfell's cold clean air seemed very far away. Ghost kept close to Nymeria and Lady, raising his hackles whenever anyone not from Winterfell's hallowed halls got too close. Jon didn't do anything to stop it.

(He felt very much the same, honest to the Gods.)

"I want to go _home_," Arya whispered into his ear. She sounded small and miserable, staring around shiftily like the dragons this city had once housed might jump out at any moment and swallow her up. She was always so fearless that sometimes Jon forgot that she'd only seen nine summers.

"Me, too," he told her quietly.

"Sansa doesn't, though," she muttered under her breath with all the venom a younger sibling could muster. "_She_ loves it here, and she loves that—that—" Arya paused to make a furious, animalistic sound, frustrated at her lack of a word vile enough for the boy she was trying to describe "—that _prince_, after what he wanted to do to Micah! And to _Lady_, even! How can she, Jon? How can she?!"

Jon didn't want to think about the sick glee on Joffrey's face when he'd tried to have the butcher's boy flayed. There'd been no telling what could have happened had he not intervened, quietly pulling Arya away from the prince to stop her from doing something that they all would have regretted forever.

And so it was that three direwolves entered King's Landing.

But there was no way to know how many would survive. After all, they were Northern creatures, and already Jon could tell that they would not do well in the mucky, murky heat of the capital

There was probably a metaphor in that, but Jon wasn't a poet, and letters were not his strong suit. That was Theon, silken words rolled off a silver tongue to raise up or cut down as he pleased. And if Theon was the letter, and Robb was the sword, then Jon was the shield.

It would make sense, then, that Lady Catelyn had wanted him to go with his father and his sisters. Jon ached for the North, but knew that he was of better use here. His father needed him. Arya needed him. And Sansa—sweet, naïve, _good_ Sansa who still believed in heroes—she needed him, too.

(Though Jon was not a hero. But a bastard-born boy was better than a golden prince with an undeniably bloodlust in his eyes.)

The sun shot hot that day. Arya was a hardscrabble little thing who stayed in her father's shadow; if she hadn't, she likely would have gotten lost in the crush of people, Nymeria at her side. As it was, she'd curled her fingers in the fabric of Jon's shirtsleeve.

But she held onto Sansa, as well. Their fingers were interlocked—they held hands like little girls, fear masked on their faces. They were a coin, his sisters; Arya was shadow and Sansa was light, and he loved them both desperately.

Though Sansa would have walked with the Queen, if she could.

But there were rules to these things. Their father went first, then the girls, then Jon.

He smiled crookedly to himself. The bastard boy still had more status than he ought—flanked like this, they were a family; missing pieces they were, of course, and Jon felt them keenly. There was no Robb to crack terrible jokes, no Theon to snark about how badly dressed all these Southerners were, no Bran to stare avidly around at the world to question everything, no Rickon to toss in the air.

No Lady Catelyn to hold his hands in her hands and tell him to call her _mother_.

King's Landing was a putrid city, yes.

But Jon had a feeling he was going to watch it rot away into nothingness.

_Winter is coming_. Jon had grown up with that phrase under his tongue, a prayer to the Old Gods that the First Men had had, always.

But they were wrong.

Winter wasn't coming.

Winter was already here.

—

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_tbc_.


	2. girls who run with wolves

**disclaimer**: disclaimed.  
**dedication**: to V, for Christmas.  
**notes**: the only time I ever get anything done is when I'm in Oolong bc I don't have internet access and I have an unending supply of tea  
**notes2**: barfs.

**chapter title**: girls who run with wolves  
**summary**: These are the things nightmares are made of. — Joffrey/Sansa/Jon, Arya.

—

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Arya Stark hated King's Landing.

It was made marginally better by her older brother's presence and her dance teacher's; it was made much, much worse by the prince. It was made impossibly boring, regardless: Nymeria didn't want to be here anymore than Arya did, but both direwolf and girl yawned and dealt with her.

Her sister seemed pleased with the proceedings, though.

That, of course, didn't surprise Arya at all. Her sister's head was full of fluff, most of the time—

"Hold my hand," Sansa whispered.

"Why?" Arya whispered back. "Don't you have a _prince_ for that, now?"

"_Please_," Sansa murmured, something desperate in her voice.

Sansa didn't say _please_ often, and almost never to Arya. There was something in that, something to latch onto, because while their father stood in front of them and Jon stood behind, right then, all they had were each other.

Arya reached for her sister's hand.

—

They shared a room, Sansa and Arya, and very little else.

"I don't like Joffrey," Arya told her sister, one night while they getting ready to blow out the candles. Lady and Nymeria were curled close together by the door, ears pricked forwards as their mistresses argued about the boy-prince.

"I know you don't," Sansa said, busied with slipping her sleeping gown over her head. She'd hung her dress in the wooden armoire, carved all over with dragons and lions and princess. Arya'd left her dress on the floor, rumpled in a pile of fabric on the floor.

"He's—"

"I _know_ what you think about him," Sansa said. She pulled the covers back from the bed—it wasn't as cold as Winterfell, not by far, but the castle's thick stone kept the worst of the heat and the humidity out—and sat down, toes curling as she pulled her knees up to her chest.

"You _don't_, though, you never _listen_—"

"You think he's evil, don't you?" Sansa asked, but it wasn't really a question.

Arya looked at her for a long time, sharp grey eyes against summer blue, and then she nodded tightly. "He's horrible. He would have—he'd have killed Micah. He'd have killed _Lady_."

The direwolf in question let out a soft gentle whine, thin and reedy in the cool air.

"You _know_ it, Sansa, you _saw_ what he'd have done!" Arya continued, reckless and thick in the throat. "I didn't want—I didn't mean—"

Sansa's shoulders slumped. "Why d'you think I wanted to hold your hand, today?"

"I don't know," Arya said honestly. "Normally, you…"

"Normally, I pretend we're not related," Sansa finished the sentence for her. The truth was ugly between them, but at least it was the truth. "But we don't—there's no one else, anymore. Just us."

"And Jon," Arya said.

"And Jon," Sansa agreed. "Only because Mother wanted him to come."

"Cersei didn't."

"She's the Queen, we can't just—"

Arya's face was fierce in the candlelight. "We can, too! They're evil, they're _all_ evil, and you know it, and I know it, and I dunno why you're pretending that they're _not_!"

Nymeria and Lady had wormed their way away from the door, and the pair of them jumped up onto the bed at the same time, puppy paws already getting large; they both had claws, and they were both deadly enough as it was. Lady whined again, pressed her cold nose to the hollow of Sansa's throat. Nymeria simply flopped down on top of Arya, and licked her chin to brow.

The two girls burst into bright, high-pitched laughter, the kind they hadn't shared since they'd been too small to realize that they were very different people.

"Why do you always have bruises?" Sansa asked, suddenly. "Dance lessons aren't that… painful, are they?"

"I'm learning how to use a sword," Arya answered. "Father said it would placate Mother."

"A _sword_? Arya, that's not very… ladylike…"

"Yeah, well, I'm not a lady, am I?" Arya asked rhetorically. "I'm—it'd be better if I was a boy, because I'm terrible at everything Old Nan says ladies have got to know how to do."

"I'm glad you're a girl, though," Sansa said quietly.

"Why?"

"Because I'd be all alone if you weren't," she said, smiled a little sadly at her younger sister. Arya reached for her hand again, this time without prompting, and the two direwolves slid back so that the two sisters could sleep pressed back to back. The candle flickered out beneath Sansa's breath, and the room plunged into darkness.

"Don't let him hurt you," Arya whispered.

"I won't," Sansa whispered back.

For now, it was only them against the world, and perhaps that was what they needed:

A common goal.

—

The days passed in a sticky wet flurry.

Arya's dance lessons went better: she came back to their room in the evenings exhilarated and laughing, and bruised less and less often.

Sansa's smile slipped, though, sometimes, when she was sewing with the Queen and her Ladies, and she pricked her fingers. Her blood ran red, but only in miniature, and the little suffering made the rest of the world somehow a little more bearable. Joffrey's lips brushed her fingers in the evenings, her darling prince, but sometimes she thought she saw knives in his mouth instead of teeth.

Still, every night the Stark sisters slept next to each other, protected on each side by their direwolves. And they whispered things softly to each other after the candle had been put out.

"I want to go _home_," Arya said.

Sansa didn't say anything at all.

Her sister must have been asleep, Arya decided—King's Landing had made them close in a way Winterfell never had, two girls made of ice in a den of lions with little else to cling on to. They're brother stayed with their father, and they didn't see their father much, these days. He was busy at the king's side, though he was grave-faced and lean where Robert was jolly and drunk.

Jon was like a shadow, and he did not belong in this place more than any of the rest of them did.

But life went on.

The coloured seemed to drain out of Sansa as the days went by, though Arya only noticed in increments. First it was the colour in her hands, then the colour in her cheeks, then at last the colour in her eyes. She wore white, mostly, these days, and walked around the castle like a ghost—a ghost with flame hair, quiet in the night. Her Tully hair was the only colour that _didn't_ leave her, and it made the rest of her look more washed out.

The nights got longer.

"What's wrong with you?" Arya stomped up to her sister, frowning hard, hands on meagre hips, "Why are you—what's _happening_ to you? What's that evil little—" she paused, uttered a name so foul Sansa stared at her, shocked "—done to you? What's he _done_, Sansa?!"

"Nothing," she said. Sansa drew her white nightdress tight around her frame. "He hasn't done anything, he's the perfect gentleman—"

"Why are you _lying_ to me?!" Arya shouted, incensed. She breathed out harsh through her nose, nostrils flaring with her rage. If there was desperation to Sansa, there was hopelessness to Arya. She didn't understand, _couldn't_ understand, why her sister was so set on Joffrey when he was so—so—_horrible_!

Sansa stared at her, lips pressed tightly together. "I'm not."

"You _are_, though!" Arya stomped her foot again, all the fiery furious rage a little girl can harness in the jerky movements of her arms. "You _are_ lying! And why're you—take that off."

"_Pardon_?!" Sansa managed, pulled the nightdress even tighter around herself.

"Take that off!" Arya gestured frantically at the

"No!" Sansa cried, desperate all of a sudden, backing away sharply enough that she nearly toppled over backwards onto the bed.

Arya pounced.

The two girls wrestled for a moment, tugging and biting, jagged on the inside. Sansa was the bigger of the two, but Arya was the crafty one, the one who didn't play nice, who'd _never_ played nice, and it was only a few minutes before the thin lacy fabric Sansa wore tore in two.

Arya, sitting on top of her older sister, gasped.

Sansa was bruised over, the marks all finger-shaped up her arms and gouged deep across her waist. Some were old—turning a sickly yellow-green with age, but most were newer, and still purple-black-blue marred across her like battle wounds.

"You have to tell father," Arya breathed. She didn't bother asking what had happened—she knew _very well_ what had happened here: that little lump of evil had put his hands on her sister, and no one had stopped him. Not even Sansa herself.

This could not stand.

"I can't," Sansa whispered lowly. "He'll make us leave, and I love it here, Arya, I really do."

"How can you?" Arya demanded. "How? After—after _this_?! Look at you, Sansa, look at what he's done! If you won't tell father, _I will_!"

"You can't, please, Arya, _please_ don't tell him. He'll—he'll do something drastic, you know father, you know how he'll react, and then—then maybe we'll never go home," Sansa pressed tired eyes into her little sister's shoulder as she spoke.

"I thought you wanted to stay," Arya said quietly.

"I _do_," Sansa insisted. "But I miss…"

"I miss the cold," Arya confessed. "And Bran and Rickon and Robb and _mum_, I miss mum. I didn't think I would, but I do, and…"

"I know," Sansa murmured. "Me, too."

"I won't let him hurt you again, Sansa," Arya said fiercely, sharp in the teeth. "I'll rip out his throat with my bare hands."

"What about your dance lessons?"

Arya frowned. "Well, if it can't be me… Jon, then?"

Sansa paled. "We can't tell Jon, he'll tell father!"

"We have to tell _someone_," Arya said. "We can't just—_look_ at you, Sansa! Have you even looked in a mirror recently?!"

Lady and Nymeria whined pathetically at the side of the bed, and the two girls stopped arguing long enough to let their direwolves up on the bed. Lady pressed her soft head to Sansa's side, tonguing at the bruises. Nymeria flopped down next to Arya, and made grumpy grumbly sounds in her throat.

"See," Arya said, "_Lady_ knows it's wrong. You shouldn't have to… you shouldn't…"

"It doesn't matter," Sansa said quietly. "I'm sure—it won't always be like this. I'll be fine."

"You'll be _dead_ is what you'll be," Arya said, breathing harshly through her nose. "You'll be dead, and then everyone—I _hate_ you, how can you do this to us? How can you do this to _yourself_!"

"I'll be fine," Sansa murmured again. "I promise."

"You'll only be fine if you kill him," Arya said. "And you _know_ it."

Sansa pushed her younger sister off and drew the covers of the bed up around her shoulders, lips trembling. Her hair fell in a long red swoop, waved soft and perfect in a way Arya's would never be.

"You can't tell anyone, Arya," she whispered. "You _can't_."

"I'm telling Jon."

"You _can't_!"

Arya jumped off the bed, began to pace in frustration. Her elder sister looks small and fragile where she sat, the thick covers of the bed making her look even smaller and more pathetic than she usually was. "I'll make him promise not to tell!"

"Arya…"

"I'm make him _promise_," Arya said. "And then he'll stick around to make sure—" she paused to gesture at Sansa's everything "—doesn't happen again."

"Father needs him," though," Sansa said, quite reasonably. And it was true; their father did rely heavily on their half-brother to help keep the new King's Hand from tearing out his hair. "They're both too honourable."

Arya stared with level gray eyes at her sister. "Then we'll switch."

"Pardon?"

"Never mind," Arya said.

"Arya, what are you planning?"

"Nothing," Sansa's younger sister said, eyes still unreadable. "We should just… forget about it."

"_Thank you_" Sansa breathed out, shivering in the cold. "I'll need another nightdress…"

Arya crawled underneath the covers as Sansa slipped away from them, still in the shreds of her nightdress. She clung to them like the last vestiges of her dignity, head up with her hair long down her back.

_Pity_, Arya thought, her eyelids drooping, _that Joffrey's so horrible. Sansa would_—

But she was asleep before she could finish the thought.

—

The next morning before the sun rose, while her sister slept still and silent and sweet, Arya slipped from their shared bed, feet soundless against the stone floor. The cold of the stone seeped up into her bones, but Arya was a Stark, and she did not feel the cold the way these Southern weaklings did.

Jon's bedroom was on the same floor, but on the other side of the castle. Arya had her suspicions about that—she could still remember Theon murmuring _divide and conquer_ in her ear when she'd tagged along with her older brothers as they played their war games—but she had spent her life sneaking about Winterfell, and now was no different.

_Fear cuts deeper than swords_, she thought, Syrio's voice was low and gentle at the back of her skull, slicking along her skin like the Water-dance Style she loved so much. Arya stuck to the shadows, ducking down small and dark whenever she thought she heard footsteps.

But there was no one, no one at all, except the smell of baking bread wafting up from the kitchens. Arya reached her older brother's room, and knocked. Jon, bleary-eyed, opened the door a moment later.

Arya looked her older brother straight in the eye. "Joffrey's hurting Sansa."

Jon rubbed a hand over his face. "What do you mean?"

"She has _bruises_."

"Get in here," he said.

And Arya went.

—

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_tbc_.


End file.
